NetApp - Exposed

The Significance of Obama's Victory to the Storage Industry

Having just finished watching his inspirational yet humble victory speech, it's clear to me Nov 4th, 2008 will go down in history as a transformational date not only for the United States, but for the world as a whole.

While this seemingly endless US presidential campaign stretched the patience and passion of most Americans, I had the luxury of observing it as a neutral 3rd party from both a personal as well as professional perspective.

Has Storage Swift-Blogging Finally Jumped the Shark?

Apologies to my readers outside of the US or Canada, as this title employs American political and pop culture slang which may not be familiar.

It's not even over yet, but to say this has been an exceptional month in the storage blogosphere would be an understatement.  I witnessed something I frankly never expected to see in the hotly competitive enterprise storage marketing landscape.  The end of unchallenged blogging belligerence.

Blogruptcy

Blog Bankruptcy or "Blogruptcy" comes about with the convergence of 3 underlying factors.  "Comment Bankruptcy", "Logical Bankruptcy" and finally "Ethical Bankruptcy".  I don't do this lightly, but this past week I've witnessed events which lead me to declare one particular blog completely bankrupt.

Tales from the crypt - Sizing and Provisioning a NetApp SAN

Yesterday I promised to conclude my analysis of EMC's (botched) Storage Capacity Utilization Magic Trick with the NetApp Prestige.  Allow me to maintain the suspense a little longer while I indulge a bit more in the Turn, courtesy of some illustrative screenshots.

Some would have you believe configuring 99.99% LUN reservations on a NetApp SAN would result in storage admin's being immediately covered by the umbrella of a mushroom cloud explosion ...

EMC's (botched) Storage Capacity Utilization Magic Trick

One of my favorite movies is The Prestige.  Among the many virtues a movie needs to make it to my "favorites list" is the ability to stay enjoyable after repeated viewings, and perhaps even reveal a bit more each time you see it.  This movie delivers on both counts.

The plot cleverly revolves around the 3 parts or acts of "every great magic trick":

1. The Pledge
2. The Turn
3. The Prestige

Before Flattery - EMC's Magic 8 Ball

NetApp is an innovator.  EMC is an imitator.  Look no further than: Storage Simplicity, NAS is mission-critical, SATA in the Enterprise, Advanced D2D Backup & Recovery, Unified Storage, iSCSI, Oracle & VMware over NFS, Thin Provisioning / Rapid Cloning ... and soon end-to-end dedupe I predict.  Then again an integrated product line with ultra-fast RAID that's also recognized as the most space-efficient (by key ISV's) may be beyond even EMC's own imagination.  So apparently not everything can be imitated :)

But did you ever wonder what happens in the uncomfortably long (for EMC) timeframe between NetApp innovation and EMC imitation?  That's the topic we'll Expose today.

Where's my red stapler?

My post last week continues to get a lot of comments from all sides, as well as some media coverage, which has kept the topic on my mind.  In fact, the past couple of weeks have been rife with current events which fully support NetApp's decision to act decisively and responsibly on behalf of our compliance customers.

The threat from within

Is there a Milton on your team?

Responsibility vs. Hysteria

Anytime someone ends a blog posting with the phrase Centera is and remains the answer, you just know there has been a disruption in the force which simply must be corrected :)

Clearly things in EMC's archiving and compliance division are getting desperate, since 'Zilla and EMC's Backup Dude have turned into Storage Chicken Little's with their creative interpretation of a routine NetApp Customer Support Bulletin regarding a benign SnapLock vulnerability which has now been closed.

Kostadis did a great job of putting this all into the proper context.  He demonstrated NetApp's continued commitment to responsible vendor behavior by continuously broadening the scope of regression testing of our solutions for potential vulnerabilities.  This enables us to follow widely acknowledged vendor security best-practices by proactively altering our installed base before they are exposed.

I'd also like to add that this is a routine fix for all SnapLock customers since they can stay within their Data ONTAP version to apply this patch (often non-disruptively).  I.e. 7.0.x customers can patch it with 7.0.7, while 7.1.x customers can do the same with 7.1.3 and finally 7.2.x customers can patch this with 7.2.5.1 at their earliest convenience.  As with any Data ONTAP patch, no user data is touched or migrated in any way, making this a very simple update.

Allegedly having to upgrade all versions of Data ONTAP to 7.2.5.1 is yet another complete misunderstanding by EMC regarding how simple compliance storage can be.  Perhaps they're drawing on their own ugly EMC Centera experience which mandates upgrading only to the latest & greatest release to fix bugs and patch security vulnerabilities?

NetApp "Intestinal Fortitude" Brings Joy to Billions

My most active EMC sparring partner (StorageZilla) certainly has a way with words, starting with a reference to hibernation and ending a recent post anticipating our "next big marketing bowel movement."  In case you're reading this near mealtime, let me assure you that I'm not going to extend that tempting metaphor any further than I have to :-)

The Canadian Perspective

If 'Zilla only lived thru the winter I just endured, perhaps he would understand why hibernation is a very appropriate explanation for my 3 month delay in between recent posts.  Digging out form under 3+ yards (that's basically 3 meters to you metric readers) of snow - including a full one during the last storm of the year - will do that to you!  Yes that is my house :-)

Interestingly our intrepid EMC blogger is a reborn Mac user and also a pop culture movie fan with a penchant for SciFi, two of many things I suspect we have in common.  Closer to home, Zilla also references a fictional army in that blog post which is led by a character played by a very accomplished Canadian actor.

The world would be a lot less fun without Data ONTAP GX

Live by the Blog, die by the Blog

As expected, Chuck wasted no time in issuing the predictable response to our SPC announcement from yesterday.  We knew he would regurgitate the tired old defense of SPC not being a relevant benchmark, etc...

So what surprised us?

Well it seems as if Chuck forgot his own open SPC invitation to the storage community.  So let me quote the most interesting section and save you a trip over there:

"... We've never done an SPC test, and probably will never do one.  Anyone is free, however, to download the SPC code, lash it up to their CLARiiON, and have at it."

Perhaps he never expected anyone to make the investment in setting up a CLARiiON to pass the rigorous SPC audit process?  Yes, that same audit process that:

1. forces you to strictly follow all performance best-practices, and
2. has now been passed by nearly every storage vendor that matters ... except EMC themselves.

As per my prior post on this topic yesterday, NetApp has over a decade of fully transparent and sensible benchmark configurations published for anyone to review.  More recently, the VeriTest and SPC reports consistently prove how our allegedly "architecturally inferior" FAS arrays clearly outperform their CLARiiON counterparts.  That mounting volume of credible evidence certainly presents challenges for those in the industry who still attempt to dismiss NetApp's performance in real-world production customer deployments.

What else surprised us?

It seems as if in his haste for a pithy response, Chuck also forgot to read the actual press release itself.  He claims he'd like to us to focus on more customer value.  So I guess:

• Delivering 23% better performance,
• At a lower price,
• With 15 less drives,
• Offering 68% higher capacity utilization,
• Protecting against all possible double-disk failure scenarios,
• Capturing consistent online recovery points without sacrificing performance,
• All while still enabling rich functionality such as efficient & space-saving Thin Provisioning

... doesn't deliver value to customers?  Hmmm.  With that type of logic at EMC, maybe VMware wasn't the reason EMC stock was down over 5% yesterday.

Exposing IT Vendor Propaganda (aka I.T. FUD)

Multi-disciplinary experts in corporate competitiveness universally agree on the significant (and sad) milestone a company reaches when it can only differentiate itself by disparaging its main competitors. At that point the company has strategically conceded defeat and leadership in innovation to those very competitors they’re attacking. The “attacking company” must then attempt to persist by relinquishing as few monopolistic habits as possible in order to maintain their decadent marketshare; clinging to the notion they have the right to all their customers’ business.

FUD or Propaganda?

Everything I learned about competitive sales cycles in the Enterprise Storage Industry has its origins in political propaganda. Mind you we’re not talking truly evil genocide-level propaganda from the darkest chapters of human history here. No, this is merely the slimy American political propaganda of our era, symbolized by the infamous “attack ad”.

Some in the industry call it F.U.D., but in my mind that term masks the underlying ugliness of the practice. If done effectively, FUD is essentially successful IT propaganda. If done poorly, it’s relegated to idle gossip. There is no other example which could properly do IT FUD justice.

Before we take ourselves too seriously

Perhaps no group has done better job of exposing the utter hypocrisy of political attack ads than the current crop of late night talk shows. Over the past few years, the “cream of the crop” are surely Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert’s “The Colbert Report”. I can think of no better approach than the latter’s over-the-top style for helping put the competitive propaganda my team routinely deals with into some light-hearted yet stunningly accurate perspective.

So I introduce to you now three important categories I shall amusingly use on this blog to put examples of IT Propaganda (FUD) and/or sheer ignorance into proper perspective:

· On Notice!

· Dead to me!

· Meta-Free-Phor-All!

Fans of the Colbert Report will instantly recognize these tongue-in-cheek approaches to various current events topics of the day. What strikes me most is just how utterly appropriate the comparisons are with the IT Propaganda most of us in the industry (as vendors, integrators or customers) deal with every day.

You can expect my blog to cover all of the topics in Stephen's "On Notice" board shown here, as well as comment on irrelevant issues which are now "Dead to Me".  Finally since metaphors are so popular with certain bloggers in the industry, I will also happily engage in "Metaphor Off's" as the opportunities arise.

May all who dare spread anti-NetApp propaganda "bathe in the moisture of your soiled and blood-soaked underwear"! :-)